The lane bends a little under your boots, packed earth gone hard with cold, the cart-ruts holding rims of old rain that have iced over at the edges. You walk slowly. The air smells of woodsmoke and wet hawthorn. Above the field to your right the sky has begun its long slow violet, the kind that comes in early December half an hour before the dark settles for good. Your breath shows, a soft cloud that lifts and is gone. Somewhere ahead a blackbird makes one low call from inside the hedge and does not call again. The hedges themselves are bare and dark with the rain of the past week, the blackthorn black as iron, the bramble going copper where the last leaves still cling.
You pass a gateway where the gate has sagged on its hinge and rests against the post in the way it has rested for a long time. Beyond it the field falls away in tired grass, the green going grey now in the failing light, and the rooks are coming home in their loose drifting lines toward the elms at the far end. They do not hurry. They cross the violet sky in twos and threes, a few of them calling, the sound carrying clean across the cold air the way sound does when the ground is hard. You stop for a moment at the gate and watch them go. The wood of the top bar is silvered, lichened along its upper edge with a pale grey-green crust that has been there longer than you have known the lane.
The lane lifts now, very gently, toward the brow where the beech stands. You hear your own boots on the road, the small grit of frost-loosened stones, the wet places where the puddles have skinned over and crack faintly when you tread their edges. From somewhere off in the trees comes the muffled sound of water moving, a ditch or a brook running low under fallen leaves. A pheasant clatters up out of the stubble two fields away, the noise of its wings carrying a long second after it has gone. Then the air closes again behind it, and the silence, which is not really silence, comes back. There is the slow tick of cold settling into wood. There is the long faint hush of wind in the high beech-tops though no wind reaches you down on the road.
You touch the wall on your left as you pass it, a low gritstone wall with mortar the colour of oats, the stones rough and cold under your fingers and slightly damp where the moss grows on the north faces. The cold of the stone is older than the cold of the air; it has been gathering in the wall since October at least, since the last warm afternoon was drawn out of it. You take your hand away and put it back in your pocket, and the warmth of the pocket is small and good. Somewhere a sheep coughs, far across the field, the dry double sound a sheep makes, and another answers it, and then nothing. The wall runs on beside you, dipping where the ground dips, climbing where it climbs, the capping stones set on edge like a row of grey teeth going into the dusk.
The smoke smell has been with you for a while now, and you look up and find its source: a far-off chimney across the valley, on the gable of a low stone farmhouse half-hidden in a fold of the land. The smoke rises straight, a pale grey column against the deeper grey behind it, lifting and lifting and only at a great height beginning to lean and thin. The air must be very still up there, as still as it is down here. You can almost taste the wood in the smoke now, applewood perhaps, or seasoned ash, a sweet dry note under the general smell of the cold. A light has come on in one of the lower windows of the farmhouse, small and yellow and far. You go on. The lane is taking you down again, between two banks of hazel cut hard a year or two ago and beginning to throw their long pale wands.
A fieldfare goes over, then another, then a loose flock of them, their voices a soft chacking from the high air. They are heading down the valley toward the hawthorn at the bottom where the berries still hang. You hear them after you can no longer see them. The light is going out of the west more quickly now, the violet deepening to a colour that has blue in it and something darker than blue, and the first stars are not yet showing but the sky is the kind of sky that will show them soon. A barn owl calls once from the wood beyond the river, a thin breathy note, and is quiet. The cold has a shape now, around your face, around the cuffs of your coat where it finds its way in, and it does not feel unfriendly. It feels like part of the walk, like the smell of the hedges, like the sound of your boots.
You come to the place where the lane crosses the brook on a flat stone bridge, two slabs of stone laid side by side, the joint between them mossed and dark. You stop on the bridge and look down. The water is low and clear and the colour of weak tea, sliding over the pale stones of its bed, slipping under a little raft of beech-leaves caught against a root. A few last leaves are coming down even now in the windlessness, drifting from the alder above the water, turning once or twice as they fall. The water takes them and carries them away under the bridge and out of sight. You can hear the small voice of the brook from underneath, the thin ringing sound of water on stone, going on and on as it has gone on through the autumn and will go on through the winter under whatever ice comes. The cold of the bridge stone reaches up through your boots.
Past the bridge the lane climbs once more, the last shallow climb before home. The hedges thicken here, holly mixed in with the hawthorn, the holly-leaves dark and shining where what light remains catches them. A robin is in the hedge, very close, and gives the small thin song it gives at this hour, three or four phrases pitched high and a little melancholy and then a pause and then again. You walk on past it and it does not stop. Behind you the song goes on, fainter, and is replaced as you walk by another robin further down the lane, and then by the first quiet beginnings of a tawny owl somewhere in the wood, the long shaped call coming through the trees twice and then once more.
The cottages of the village show now ahead, a low line of slate roofs and pale walls, two or three windows lit warm against the dusk. A dog barks once and is hushed. The lane levels. You can smell coal-smoke now mixed with the woodsmoke, the slightly sharper note of it, and somewhere the smell of cooking, onions, a stew on a hob. A cat crosses the lane in front of you without hurry, a dark shape low to the road, and slips through a gap in a garden wall. The light from the nearest window lays a soft yellow rectangle on the verge, and the frost in the grass there is beginning to show, each blade rimed faintly, the first of the night's frost setting in.
You slow as you come to the gate, because there is no hurry, and because the lane has carried you well, and because the violet overhead has gone now to something nearer black and the first star is up, very small, over the slate roof of the house. The latch is cold under your thumb. The gate swings on its hinge with the small familiar sound it makes. You step through and close it behind you, and the click of the latch is quiet, and the path to the door is short. The smoke from your own chimney lifts straight into the dark above the roof, pale against the deepening sky, going up and up and thinning away into the cold air, going up still as you stand a moment on the path and watch it go, the smoke and the one star and the blue-black above them and the slow soft settling of the frost over everything